The eighties

I met Ruby at The University of Calgary -- in a Romantic Literature class! We got married in my parent's living room.

We spent the summer after the wedding at Rosen Lake (in southeastern B.C.).

At Rosen Lake, where I wrote my M.A. thesis (on Walt Whitman and Daoism). Here Ruby is entertaining our Toronto friends Frank and Cathy, while I get some writing done.

Having tea with my M.A. supervisor Dr. Inder Nath Kher and his wife Sulochana in Calgary.

For our honeymoon, we spent most of our savings on a year-long backpacking trip around East Asia.We spent months exploring the western parts of China (Xinjiang and Yunnan provinces had just been opened up to tourists). We took these shots in and around Dali.

Filipino kids on a beach, perhaps in Puerto Galera, I'm not sure (we went to alot of islands -- some of them economically grim, all of them beautiful).

After island hopping, we stayed for three weeks in a hut on the white sand beach of Boracay, after which we went up to northern Luzon to see the rice paddy terraces around Bontoc.

After travelling in East Asia, we lived with my parents for about two years in Victoria. Pictured here are Clark, Brenda's husband Michel, Mom, little Amandine, Brenda, Dad, Ruby, Clark's wife Jacqueline, and me.

With my brother Clark on the Victoria ferry.

Helping Allan build a cabin on Mudge Island.

Ruby, India. We went to India from November 1987 to February 1988, partly in preparation for my graduate work on Indian writers. I met with poets in Bangalore and Mumbai (then Bombay), where we stayed a month and spent a number of afternoons in coffee shops with the poet Nissim Ezekiel.

One day in Mumbai I wandered into Elphinstone College and met Dr. Jussawalla, the Head of the English Department. She showed us around the city -- from her favourite Parsee restaurants to the Willingdon Club. Here she's holding her volume on the 16th Century poet Edmund Spenser.

the Nineties

In the 90s we lived in Kitsilano while I did a Ph.D. at UBC. We had alot of parties. Eight years later I got my degree -- and turned my thesis into a book, Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie's Other Worlds (McGill-Queen's, 2001). Here we are in front of the house we shared with Rob and Jackie.

Rob and I -- probably about to terrorize the nearby beaches and parks on our mountain bikes ...